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Terra not quite so Firma as EMI sucks down cash
Terra Firma dropped off the accounts for the year earlier today. They don't make very encouraging reading for Guy Hands' stewardship of EMI, with the value of the company being written off by 50%:
Terra Firma has written off half the value of its €2.6 billion (£2.3 billion) investment in music group EMI. The private equity giant revealed in its 2008 annual report that EMI accounts for most of a €1.36 billion (£1.22 billion) non-cash impairment charge on Terra Firma’s 2008 balance sheet.
Not, of course, that the terrible, cash-burning mess is the fault of Terra Firma. Oh, good lord, no:
In his executive statement, CEO Guy Hands squarely criticises banking executives, regulators and politicians for investing too much faith in credit during the boom: they should have seen it was “merely a very large bubble waiting to burst”, he says.
Ah yes. Bankers, executives, regulators. Politicians. They should have seen it coming. Instead of expecting the man lauded by his admirers as "a genius [who is] seeing things that other people don't" and who just last year was chuckling about "completing EMI Music's transition to a global functional matrix organization" to have any inkling that over-borrowing to buy out companies was less gravy train, more a leaky sauce boat.
2 comments:
My apologies to Every Mistake Imaginable, whose comment I inadvertently deleted while trying to trim a porn advert. This is what they said:
“There is no doubt that EMI is a tremendous challenge, but it is also a huge opportunity and our success or failure will not be correlated to the markets, but to our ability to effect change, quickly and decisively. It is this type of deal that Terra Firma focuses on and from which it makes money.”
I should also point out they were quoting Hands directly.
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